3 Common Marketing Mistakes of Private Schools

A lot of private schools struggle with marketing. Most of the time this is because there is no room in the budget for a marketing director, so the marketing is held from a higher position and done only at crunch times. When that's not the case, often the marketing director is so overloaded he or she can barely keep up with the daily demands.

So does this mean private schools are doomed to failure and must come to terms with lower enrollment rates?

The answer is, no. Not if you have a tight marketing strategy. One that hits home with your target audience and gives people cause to open their wallets year after year.

If you know the common mistakes most schools make, it’s easy to figure out a strategy that works and gives a larger ROI (Return on Investment).

While the other guys are making these mistakes, you will be standing out from the crowd and increasing your bottom line.

1. Not Creating and Using a Strong Marketing Plan Each Year.

Having a plan means you can focus your already overloaded resources (budget and staff) into a focused marketing strategy with a specific goal.

Whether your goal is to increase your enrollment for the coming year or to amp up your fundraising efforts, having a plan will see you to the finish line and prevent losing track of where you need to go.

Creating a plan can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, depending on how many avenues of marketing you want to use and how many key decision makers need to sign off on it. Prior to the beginning of each school year (or at the end of each year), sit down and make a list of your goals, then incorporate those goals into the overall marketing strategy.

Knowthis.com has a great model for creating a marketing plan that we highly recommend. It consists of 6 parts:

1. Defining your Purpose and Mission
2. Conducting a Situational Analysis
3. Deciding on Marketing Strategy and Objectives
4. Writing Tactical Programs
5. An Estimation of Budgets, Performance Analysis and Implementation
6. Additional Consideration

Take each point and work it over until all the points are in alignment. Then make sure all key personnel get on board with it.

2. Not Conducting a Situational Analysis.

A situational analysis is the core of your marketing plan. While it's listed above in Point #1, it deserves a closer look because overlooking this can mean 'shot-in-the-dark marketing'.

A situational analysis is the process by which you take a close, honest look at your strengths and weaknesses and where you identify possible opportunities and threats to growth. This means looking at what your school stands for, who your customers are, as well as who your competitors are (including any public schools in your area).

By taking all these factors into consideration, you can then find opportunities for growth and needs you can fill that your competitors are not filling. This isn't to say you must change your model. You are probably already offering programs that parents in your community need and want. It's a matter of making them aware of this fact.

One of the biggest mistakes many people make is that they think "we already know who our customers are". Oftentimes, an executive's idea of this is far from actuality and can be detrimental and costly to marketing.

For example, an executive may be insisting on targeting higher income families with the idea that those are the people who can afford the tuition. However, a closer look at the current families already in the school shows a majority are middle income earners who may choose to sacrifice yearly vacations so their child can receive a good education at your school.

This means you would be wise to target your marketing at more families like the above scenario rather than pouring your marketing budget into a 'wishful thinking' campaign.

3. Not Using Personal Stories.

Personal stories are the heart of your marketing. Think about it. What makes you want to go to a restaurant, send your child to a specific school, or hire “Joe Blow” accountant?

A study conducted by Intelliseek found that consumers are “50% more likely to be influenced by word-of-mouth recommendations from their peers than by radio/TV ads.”

Interview parents, alumni, donors, and outside groups that benefited from your school’s efforts. Use their stories to help tell your story.

The list could probably go on, but if you add the above three things into your yearly marketing, you will add direction and focus to where you want to take your school. You will also be doing something your competitors are not, which gives you the advantage.

If all else fails, you can always out-source to a marketing firm that can breathe fresh air into your marketing. This will free up your marketing staff (or overworked executives) to oversee things from the big picture. Just make sure that before hiring a marketing firm you ask for references and samples of their work. It's always smart to check someone out first before plunking down thousands of dollars!

The World According to Twitter: A Review

Every night New York Times writer, David Pogue, would sit patiently at his computer awaiting responses to questions. Questions he had sent out into the Twitterverse.

At first it started out as an amusing way to demonstrate to others how Twitter worked. After a while, he realized he was on to something (with the help of his wife). He would pose questions between 11p.m. and 1a.m. EST, thinking it would give people across the most time zones a chance to see them. He asked things like, “What’s your greatest regret?” and, “What’s your million dollar idea?”

After getting more than 25,000 responses to 95 questions about “Life, the Universe, and Other Pertinent Stuff: First-Kiss Stories, Spam from the Future, and Proposals for the 11th Commandment,” from his 500,000 followers, he compiled the best of those responses, 2,524 to be exact, into a book called, The World According to Twitter.

The World According to Twitter is an amusing read with many tweets that will have you chuckling. From a marketer’s standpoint, it’s a great resource to have on hand when looking for a consensus on many of the topics broached. For instance, if you want to know how to approach writing an ad on how to get rid of hiccups, you can find ways to speak to people that you never thought of before. (Read page 74 if you don't believe us.)

Although it’s not a real-time Twitter search, it still has its uses - even if only for an amusing pastime. We give this book two thumbs up.

Twitter Gone Wild: How Many Are Too Many Followers?

As a copywriter, marketer, or person involved in the marketing department of a company, one of your jobs is to listen to what your client (or client's client) is saying.

Twitter, whether it's your personal Twitter account or your company account, is one of the best tools to use to search for what people are talking about. Why? Because it’s happening right now. Not three weeks ago or three years ago.

Lately, however, many people have had an overwhelming desire to delete all their Twitter followers and just start from scratch.

The amount of DMs (that’s Twitter-speak for Direct Messages, aka, Twitter email) with offers for white teeth, free porn, and claims of “I am a pro at XYZ industry,” as ballooned at an alarming rate.

Many people initially joined Twitter to connect with friends and find out things they didn't know by reading their tweets. Just like it says in this Twitter video: Twitter in Plain English.

After a while, people started awakening to the professional benefits Twitter had to offer and started following a bunch of people and organizations. Those people and organizations followed back, and so the follower counts grew from there.

The problem is when you have too many people you follow, the lack of quality tweets in your timeline can become frustrating – especially if one of your jobs is to listen to topics that relate to what your clients need.

You know it’s time to buckle down and dump people you follow when your ability to focus on what your clients want could suffer. For some this might mean keeping your following under the 3000 mark. For others, it might mean just several hundred. You can judge for yourself where your comfort zone lies.

Of course, one of the easiest ways to utilize Twitter as copywriter or a marketer is to go to http://search.twitter.com/. You can enter any keywords related to your particular need. Chances are you will find at least several results that will lead you in the right direction.

You can also utilize apps like TwitterKarma.com to help manage your followers. It will show you how many followers you are following that aren’t following you, who is following you that you aren’t following, and a few other useful things.

The only drag is that you have to manually click on each person to either follow or unfollow, so it could take as much as an hour to vet out all the people you don’t want. Or you could hire someone to do this task for you.

A couple of other great apps for this task are FriendOrFollow.com, and TwitterAnalyzer.com.

Hopefully you will find a happy medium where you can easily manage and listen to all your followers (and following).

* * *

We are currently working on increasing our follower count on Twitter. If you enjoy reading our blog, you can help us out by following us right now. Wink. Wink. Hint. Hint. Nudge. Nudge.

How to Set Yourself Apart From the Competition

It's been a couple of weeks since our last blog post. Bad on us, but we have been out-of-town, busy little bees. One of us is back (me), so I thought it was time to update the 'ol blog.

During my recent travels to Denver, I found a shocking discovery. Maybe it shouldn't have come as quite a shock, but it did. It seems as if more businesses these days are offering less and charging more. And us consumers don't have much of a choice.

You want to fly somewhere? Fine. Except, there are now added security charges post-911. Well, we can all look at that and be sort of okay with it in the name of increased security. Oh, but you want to check a bag? Well, even though we are charging more to make up for the increase in fuel costs, we now need to charge you extra for your bags to make up for the increase in fuel costs. Huh? Wait, didn't I just say that? Hmm. There must be an echo in here. Need to check your email in the airport? Yup, that's extra (although many are now offering free wi-fi - thankyou Denver, Oakland, Portland, and Tampa). Are you hungry? You can purchase a meal on-board if you don't have the foresight or the time to grab something in the airport. That'll be $5.00 please.

Just when you thought all the extra charges were over with, you arrive at your hotel for a brand new round of charges. While the room costs $167 per night, the hotel no longer offers complimentary continental breakfast. That will be $20. If you don't like that you can mosey on across the street to Starbucks and purchase a less expense breakfast. Have a rental car? Every time you take it out for a spin, the valets are standing, hands out-stretched, ready for a five-spot. Bring it back in to be parked for the night? Well, you get the idea.

By the end of my last business trip. I was ready to scream with all the extra little fees here and there.

So, this points to Captain Obvious: If everyone is charging more and giving less, all you have to do to stand out from the competition is go that extra little mile and offer better, faster service than your competitors.

We recently surveyed a group of business owners and found that one of the most pressing things on their mind was, "How do I stand out from the competition?"

Nobody wants to go broke trying to offer a bunch of things for free just to try to stand out. That's not the point. The point is to offer better and faster service or offer something unique.

Let's take the Sheraton hotel I stayed at in Denver as an example of not doing this. It's a pretty nice hotel. I came to terms with the fact that their restaurant wanted to charge quite a bit for a buffet breakfast. It was pretty delicious in fact. The biggest problem I had with this hotel was the total lack of free wi-fi. It was actually quite shocking that they wanted to charge me a per day fee to use wi-fi in my room. Because I refused to pay, I trekked down to the lobby each day to use one of about seven computers where I could check my email for free.

I'm sorry to pick on the Sheraton here, but even a lesser quality hotel, such as the Best Western, offers free wi-fi, hot buffet breakfast, free parking, etc. To be fair and choose a hotel on the same level as the Sheraton, most Marriott hotels include all these things when you stay as well.

As a business traveler, if I had to pick one thing out of all the above that would have made my trip great, it would be free wi-fi. What if I want to Skype my family from my hotel room? Or send an important business email without worrying about others peeking over my shoulder (which by the way happened three times at the Sheraton - oh, yes it did!).

You can take things on a large scale and talk about airlines offering front of the line boarding priveleges to passengers traveling without carry-on baggage (ahem, yes, I'm talking to you Virgin America), or we can go smaller and talk about how the little guys scattered all over our country with small businesses can stand out.

Here are a few ideas:

• Get to know your customers on a one-to-one basis by having them follow you on Twitter or fan you on Facebook. Why is this important? Because you can get intimate with them (so to speak) and find out what's really on their mind.
• Are you a hotel, cafe, airport, restaurant? Offer free wi-fi.
• Give special discounts if people shop on certain days at your store (whether online or brick and mortar).
• Schools, colleges, and institutions can offer a gift card for a local cafe or restaurant to existing families and alumni/ae that refer prospective students in the door.
• Restaurants can send postcards offering a free appetizer with a meal purchase for anyone that comes in on a particular day (pick your slowest day of the week).
• Send a thank you card to your clients at Thanksgiving instead of during one of the winter holidays. People get bombarded with cards at Chanukah, Christmas, and New Year's, but when was the last time your realtor sent you a card for Thanksgiving? 
  

Think outside the box and try to come up with ways that are unique to your business to offer something special to your customers.

You can take it one step further than this, and look at how you can authenticate yourself from the other businesses similar to yours in your marketplace. This is getting into the subject of looking at your brand and what makes you unique. Next week's blog will delve further into this topic, but hopefully I've given you some food for thought.

Here's to stimulating the economy and bending over backwards for the customer (rather than having the customer bend over).

A Winning Resume = More Money in Your Pocket

Did you know it takes an employer only 30 seconds or less to scan a resume and decide if it makes the cut or goes in the wastebasket? Only a few make the cut, according to resume expert, Tom Kavala.

So, how can you make the cut without paying someone hundreds of dollars to do your resume? Here are a few tips and tricks of the trade to make a winning resume all by yourself (but you can email me if you really need help: rachel@6degreesmediagroup.com).

Firstly, and most importantly, is to stop looking at your resume as a long list of your job history (yawn). Boring! You've got to look at it from an employer's perspective. It's got to stand out. He's going to ask questions like, "Has this person saved their previous companies money? If so, how much?" and "Has she increased sales? If so, by what percentage?"

Like it or not, an employer is looking for someone he knows can achieve results. Bottom line. If you can't "show them the money" so to speak, your resume goes straight to the T-R-A-S-H.

Secondly, for gawds sake, stop listing every job under the sun you have ever held. Nobody cares! What an employer really cares about is what jobs have you held that make you a good candidate for his company. Unless you really think your retail job in college makes you a good candidate for the marketing department of Hewlitt Packard, don't put it in there. For instance, retail has a marketing aspect to it, so explain how it helped you become better at marketing. (Not dissing on retail jobs at all!)

Thirdly. Education. If you've had too much education for the job you want (or even experience for that matter), a company won't hire you because they know they can't afford you. This presents the challenge of only adding information about education you've had that relates to the position you are seeking. On the other hand, if you have not had enough education, you can explain how your experience makes you a good candidate for the job despite not having a degree.

On this note, if you are in the process of obtaining your degree, be sure to note this at the top of your education credentials along with your completion date. And, always list your highest level of education down to the lesser levels. Obviously, if you have a doctorate there's no need to list that you graduated from high school because that's assumed.

Fourthly (is that a word?), make sure your Objective is worded very well. Since the objective goes at the top of your resume just under your contact info, you want to be clear why you are the best candidate for the job.

Think of the Objective section as a summary of what's to come in the resume. A sort of teaser if you will. It's what entices the employer to skip the trash pile and place your resume in the stack of "to be called" people. The Objective section is where you would toot your own horn and would read something like this:

Resume: At Acme warehouse, I increased their sales by 37.5% in one year.
Employer: Hmmm. This guy's exactly what I need!

Fifth and lastly, avoid listing too many miscellaneous things at the end of your resume. People like to get cute in this section, but it just comes across as unprofessional in most cases.

Summary
Once you get your foot in the door with your resume, the interview is all you, baby! Make sure you are well-prepared for your interview. You can get someone to rehearse an interview ahead of time with some mock questions.

If you get stumped or don't even know where to begin to create a fantastic resume, just call me. I give free consultations with no strings attached: (800) 662-6808.

Rachel Karl
Co-Founder
6 Degrees Media Group
"We connect you to the world..."

Win More Clients with a Simple Tool

Recently, in revamping our info kit, we realized what a gem it is to have one of these to show to prospective clients. Used correctly, it is a great tool you can use to land a new client.

"What is an info kit?" you ask.

An info kit is essentially your bio and portfolio combined into one fabulous package (with a lot of other information too). We think it’s a must-have tool to use. A lot of would-be clients are impressed by a carefully crafted info kit.

But there are a few things you should know before creating an info kit.

What do I include in my info kit?

An info kit basically includes the following items:

* A Welcome Letter
* Testimonials From Satisfied Clients
* A Price Guide
* Your Bio
* Some Samples of Your Work
* Any other information about your services you’d like prospective clients to know.

Look at it this way. If you were sitting down face-to-face with a client, what kinds of questions would she ask you, and how would you answer? What sorts of samples would you show her? Do you have a client list you’d like her to see? A bio? Testimonials?

Anything you would want a client to see in person, is what you would put in your info kit.

The best and most attractive format is to assemble all of this information into one PDF file. It looks clean and professional, there is only one attachment to open up, and it really wows your prospects.

If you don't have the ability to create PDF files with Adobe, I highly recommend upgrading. You can also collaborate with others on Adobe documents.

How do I use an info kit?

Let’s say you are on the phone with a prospect who called because he received a direct mail piece you sent out, or he found your website. (It would be smart to include a link to your info kit on your website by the way.)

He has a project he wants to discuss with you, but first he’d like to see if you are the right person for the job.

If you are prepared with your trusty info kit, you can simply email it over to him while you’re on the phone. While he's looking at it, you can continue to discuss the project, or ask him to look over the information and arrange a time to get back to him to see if he has any questions.

Nine times out of ten, your prospect will begin discussing his project with you right then over the phone. And before you know it, you have closed the deal. This is because you have already positioned yourself as an expert simply by having a professional-looking information kit.

And the reality is, most prospects won't even read through your entire info kit. Sounds crazy, right?

Why?

Because just by seeing a few pages, or browsing quickly through it, he can see you know what you're doing!

Click here to see our info kit to get an idea of how to assemble your own kit.

If you need more tips or would like help assembling one for yourself, I would be happy to help - free of charge. Why would I do that? Because I like to see people succeed.

Just contact me at Rachel@6degreesmediagroup.com, or call me today at 800-662-6808.

It’s annual report season. In the confusion of today’s economy, let your story inspire hope.

I'm not talking about the boring corporate annual reports. I'm talking about a different breed of annual report. The annual report you send to your supporters. The kind that resonates with them.

FACT: Annual reports consistently inspire supporters and instill confidence.

Mark Rovner, founder of Sea of Change Strategies, agrees, “They are more powerful, more compelling, and more emotionally “grabby” than the organizations’ home page.”

FACT: Increased donor confidence leads to higher annual revenues.

Rovner also says: "I have been told by more than one major donor fundraiser that the single most important page in the book is the page on which the donor is mentioned by name."

You may wonder, “Why write an annual report if non-profits aren’t required to do so?” The answer is simple: Your donors want to be inspired. They need to know there is hope out there in the midst of all the chaos.

If that still doesn’t convince you, let’s look at it another way: Donors have come to expect an annual report as a best practice followed by some of the largest non-profits in the country. Here are just a few:

American Cancer Society
American Red Cross
Boy Scouts of America
Christian Children’s Fund
Easter Seals
Goodwill Industries
Make-a-Wish Foundation
Smithsonian Institute

How will you inspire your supporters this year?

Currently I am offering a 20-minute comprehensive consultation. During that time, I evaluate exactly where you are at, how an annual report would benefit you (or not), and give you a solid road map on what needs to happen to create a perfect report. You can use this information with any copywriter or firm of your choice.

To schedule your consultation, simply email me at rachel@6degreesmediagroup.com or call me at 800-662-6808, and I will be happy to help you out.